The fire, the country’s most deadly since 47 perished in a firework factory disaster in 2017, broke out at 1.45 a.m., said Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly, after visiting the scene.

“We’re working together with the relevant authorities to look into the causes of the fire and of course formulating prevention strategies so that severe catastrophes like this won’t happen again,” Yasonna said in a statement.

The minister said two of the dead were foreign nationals, from South Africa and Portugal, and confirmed the prison was operating at overcapacity when the fire broke out, Reuters reported.

Cells were locked at the time, the minister said, but with the fire raging uncontrollably several could not be opened.

Earlier on Wednesday, Rika Aprianti, a spokeswoman for the ministry’s Correctional Facilities Directorate General, said 122 prisoners were being detained on drug-related offences in the block built to hold 38.

Rika said all 41 fatalities were inmates, adding that authorities were still evacuating the facility as of 9 a.m.

On Wednesday morning local TV showed footage of flames engulfing the detention facility, and later, the building’s charred remains as victims were pulled from the scene in orange body bags.

Hilwani, a doctor at the Tangerang General Hospital, told Reuters that some of the bodies had been so badly burned they were unidentifiable.

Another hospital official said several victims were being treated in intensive care units.

‘We couldn’t free our child’

Nursin, a father of one of the victims, said at the prison that the family could not afford to pay his 22-year-old child's legal expenses before going on trial for a drug-related offence.

“We are poor [...] we couldn’t free our child,” he said, tearfully.

Another relative, identified as Marlinah, said she had raced to the local hospital after officials called her home to say her younger brother Muhammad Yusuf had died.

“I just hope the procedure is not complicated so I can bring my brother’s body home for burial,” she said, as quoted by AFP.

A Jakarta Police spokesperson told broadcaster Metro TV that 73 people had suffered nonserious injuries and the initial suspicion behind the cause was “an electrical short circuit”.

The electrical wiring at the prison had not been upgraded since the 1970s when the prison was built, Minister Yasonna told Wednesday’s briefing.

Overcrowding

Prisons in Indonesia are notoriously overcrowded, with experts saying the phenomenon is partly due to the emphasis on incarceration rather than rehabilitation of those convicted of drug-related offences under the country’s strict narcotics laws.

The prison in Tangerang housed more than 2,000 inmates in total, far exceeding its 600 capacity, according to government data.

There are currently some 270,000 inmates being held in prisons nationwide, and jailbreaks are frequent. In 2019, at least 100 prisoners escaped from a jail in Riau after a riot and fire broke out.

In April last year, 29,000 inmates were released in a bid to stop COVID-19 from rampaging through a prison system known for its unsanitary conditions.

Leopold Sudaryono, a criminologist and PhD candidate at the Australian National University, said that overcrowding also complicated emergency evacuation efforts, given the limited number of staff working at the prison.

“Fire-detection efforts and evacuations are difficult,” he said.

The head of the prison was not immediately available for comment on the ratio of inmates to guards, nor the capacity of the facility. Law and Human Rights Ministry spokeswoman Rika told local media that 13 guards had been on duty at the facility at the time of the blaze.

There have been several deadly fires in Indonesia in recent years. As well as the 2017 Tangerang fireworks factory blaze, a 2019 fire at a matchstick factory in North Sumatra killed 30 people.